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Its funny sometimes how memories creep up on you and associated feelings and periods in time that you had perhaps forgotten become important in an instance.

I was out this evening for a leaving do of a colleague from my current job, in Guildford , a town that has played a significant role in a large part of my late teen and early adult years. It was strange walking through the town and seeing both the things that where the same and those that had changed so much so that the times I remember seem like a bygone era.

Thinking about it, an era is perhaps what it has been, it was the ages of 16-23 that I spent most of time in this town over a decade ago now, which when put in those terms seems a lot longer ago than perhaps I would like it to be. Since then most of the friends have moved on, we still catch up on Facebook and comment on the important events like moves, funerals, new arrivals and perhaps even meet in person for the odd “special” birthday celebration, but to all intense and purposes it might as well have been another lifetime.

But returning to this evening, as I walked back from the top of town and (at least in my eyes) the newly christened MKB bar, the rain soaking me through and my feet taking me down back ally’s and through shortcuts that they still remembered but I had long forgotten, i was transported to not one, but an amalgamation of nights from my early twenties.

As I walked past the now abandoned shell of Old Orleans and past the (new) Odeon my feet could have easily carried me onward past the station on on to the then girlfriend, now wife’s student Diggs, that I would have crashed at on a regular basis a few hours later but a decade earlier.

I couldn’t tell you which night I was thinking off, or why this particular combination of rain, dripping clothes and alcohol conjured up images of those years gone past, but what I can say is that for a brief fleeting moment I was stumbling home from a night out at CR’s (Cinderella’s, Dusk or TIME as it was known across the years), having missed the last train and desperately hoping that girlfriend (now Wife) was awake enough and not mad enough to let me stay the night.